Origami spaceplane aims for space station descent

The spaceplane is about 20 cm long and is made of paper, but it has passed wind tunnel tests at Mach 7 and 200 °C

A paper plane might not seem ideally suited to space travel, but a Japanese engineering professor is collaborating with origami masters to design a small paper spacecraft that could be launched from the International Space Station and survive a descent to Earth.

A prototype was successfully tested in a wind tunnel last week.

“This origami airplane might some day actually fly,” says Jim Longuski, an expert in aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in the US.

Longuski, who was not involved in the project, says that offbeat notions often generate exciting new ideas. “I don’t think it’s crazy at all,” he told New Scientist.

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The novel craft could inspire new designs for lightweight re-entry vehicles, or for planes to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere, according to Shinji Suzuki, from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Tokyo.

Heat resistant

Suzuki worked with members of the Japan Origami Airplane Association on the design for the plane.

They first collaborated a decade ago to design a 3-metre long paper plane shaped like a space shuttle, which was launched from the top of a mountain.

The origami space plane will be a similar design, Suzuki says, but only about 20 centimetres long and with a rounded nose to minimize aerodynamic heating.

It will also be chemically processed to incorporate silicon in the paper structure, increasing its heat resistance, although the plane shouldn’t be subjected to the fiery temperatures endured by heavier objects as they hurtle toward Earth.

When released from the International Space Station, it would be travelling at Mach 20, Suzuki says, but thanks to a large surface area and low weight it should slow considerably as it falls through the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

A smaller prototype paper plane was tested up to Mach 7 and about 200 °C in a hypersonic wind tunnel in Tokyo last week.

‘Nice gimmick’

In theory, the plane could come all the way down to the ground without ever getting that hot, says Steven Schneider, at Purdue University, who was also not involved with the project.

If the paper spaceplane is ever launched, however, we might never find out what happens to it.

Suzuki plans to write a message on the plane in many languages, asking anyone who finds it to return it to the Japan Origami Airplane Association, but that’s unlikely, according to Schneider, because the plane could land almost anywhere on Earth.

A paper plane wouldn’t show up on radar and would be extremely difficult to observe through a telescope. “You’ll drop it off and it’ll disappear,” Schneider told New Scientist. “It’s a nice gimmick, but without a way to observe the thing it’s not much more than a nice idea.”

Suzuki says he would like to develop an ultra small tracking device to attach to the plane.